[Twitter] On the topic of Evernote's "Contact Us" page...

[Paul A. 627]

 

 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,979]

 

[kkarney 107]

To be fair, both Google and M$ do have phone numbers and email addresses if you look hard enough. Haven't seen that w/ Evernote. And when I enter a support ticket w/ M$, they actually respond. That's really my main gripe w/ EN support. At least acknowledge my existence with something other than a canned and empty promise...

[mackid1993 775]

To be fair to Evernote, they do eventually respond Google and Microsoft are multi-TRILLION dollar companies and they both have absolutely horrific support that while you can call them are beyond useless, I've actually found Evernote support as slow as they are to be way more coherent than anything from big tech. 

Out of all of the small tech companies I have subscriptions with, Fastmail has the best support.

Now if they could respond to tickets quicker I'd be happy, although I work in IT and I know what a helpdesk is like. I used canned responses most of the time I respond to tickets, so I understand and don't blame them for that.

For a bug report all they can do is pass on to the developers and acknowledge it, for an actual issues with my account I've gotten real typed responses from people. 

[gazumped 11,706]

Support does exist,  and does respond,  although they're still glacially slow.  I've also worked in Support situations where a department - through no fault of its own* - gets hit with a year's worth of reports in a few weeks.  The situation then gets exponentially worse because more and more of the users waiting for a response start sending in reminders and complaints in addition to the original report. 

There is no magic wand that anyone can wave to clear that backlog quickly.  Hiring new staff takes time.  Training new staff to be effective takes longer.  And the joys of working in a war zone means your staff turnover starts to spike too...

I'm not excusing or accepting the current situation - but unless someone has a spare miracle hanging around,  fixing this will takes as long as it takes. Complaining about it is not helpful.  The Forums however can offer suggestions based on experience for anything that's not authentication or subscription related...

*Support staff have zero control over management decisions.

[PinkElephant 8,181]

All correct, and it fits my experience as support manager.

What I observed (with a raised eyebrow): Last summer BS was hiring for support. This then stopped. Currently they are hiring again, both support specialist and support manager (although it is not visible whether it is for EN or one of the other branches, and maybe they don’t even go by product on the 1st level).

This is a weird pattern when you intentionally turn a longterm business upside down, technically and in the plans & pricing area.

What doesn’t match at all is aspiration (documented by a top of the market price level) and execution (by an ongoing support downfall that is now going into the 9th consecutive month, when I take August 2023 as a starting point of the support blackout).

And yes, that a management issue.

[gazumped 11,706]

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

And yes, that a management issue.

...Might be both an experience and a cultural thing too...  'Spoons was very successful,  very quickly,  in markets that don't seem to me to need a lot of hand-holding. 

Either your video app works,  or it doesn't.  Not much chance of getting a different shade of grey than you expected in your image and needing to fix it.  A pandemic database is just a database... etc.  Models that involve lots of coding but little support.

Buying up large companies with millions of users and an active support team is something that only started 9 months or so ago - and "how busy is your support team?" isn't one of the first questions you'd necessarily have on your due diligence list.  'Spoons have bought another couple of companies since and at least in one other case have closed down the local operations and brought everything back to Italy.

Having made some necessary but -maybe- over-hasty decisions with Evernote,  to fix the pricing, stop misuse of the free account, and upgrade the code and servers for future expansion,  they clearly didn't anticipate the torrent of feedback and complaint that would follow. 

When that happens,  the knee-jerk response is "hire more staff".  But there's a catch in there somewhere - when your extra 100's of staff have helped  you catch back up - do you just lay them off again?

There's no such thing as a 'temporary' expert - you invest a lot of time and training in getting someone up to a level;  and people have these unreasonable expectations of salaries and security...

And maybe 'Spoons are finding out with their other more recent acquisitions that customers don't usually react well to changes.

In line with their innovative  approach to things in general I'd suspect that the company went away and re-imagined support departments in general so that one team can service all products,  supporting themselves by as much automation (and yes,  AI...) as they can.  (The one area I think AI can be helpful in is that it -in effect- can read every reference document in existence on a particular subject.  If you can ask a coherent question,  it can - with training and supervision - give you a correct answer in 99.9% of cases). 

Let's call this last activity Plan C - which is what I think the latest round of recruitment is about.  Hopefully 'Spoons have at last worked out how to fix their issues most effectively with staff and systems,  and are now working quickly and actively towards doing so.

All of which is pure speculation,  just my 2c and doesn't excuse the initial inexperience of making several incendiary changes to a product without making sure you have the customer-facing resources to handle them. 

Mind you IMHO Evernote is currently 100% better than it ever was - provided (obviously) you don't need quick Support.

And I'm 'old school' when it comes to work-arounds;  if you have a deadline and your software breaks - so what?  For any situation you can't address with different software there are always options.  I've mentioned here before that I once was involved with a Main Board level project to collate the annual reports of several national HO's into one briefing sheet for Directors,  and just before the final presentation,  after months of high-level work,  someone spotted an obvious (then) spreadsheet mistake.

While I was busy having heart-failure and composing my resignation letter the project lead calmly lifted a bottle of Tipp-Ex out of his (board level) waistcoat pocket and painted out the offending detail.  "There's always a way" he said...  I think he was Italian too...

[janndk 527]

6 hours ago, gazumped said:

I'm not excusing or accepting the current situation - but unless someone has a spare miracle hanging around,  fixing this will takes as long as it takes. Complaining about it is not helpful. 

Evernote (Bending Spoons) operate and act based on feedback, and have also said it quite clearly. There is no reason to believe their customer support would get better if nobody is complaining and just quietly waiting "as long as it takes".

[janndk 527]

...and if they focused more on fixing bugs, than inventing new [and buggy] functions, there would be less need for support.

[gazumped 11,706]

Hmmn.  Maybe if we could focus on a more welcoming and supportive environment in the Forums with contributors supplying fixes instead of rants and complaints,  we could actually help Support get their act back together again by helping new users and recent adopters work their way around their problems...

[janndk 527]

27 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Hmmn.  Maybe if we could focus on a more welcoming and supportive environment in the Forums with contributors supplying fixes instead of rants and complaints,  we could actually help Support get their act back together again by helping new users and recent adopters work their way around their problems...

Evernote/Spoons is the only one who can supply fixes (but unfortunately don't prioritize that very high). There is a need to get problems fixed, not just to find work-arounds.

[gazumped 11,706]

46 minutes ago, janndk said:

Evernote/Spoons is the only one who can supply fixes (but unfortunately don't prioritize that very high). There is a need to get problems fixed, not just to find work-arounds.

So:  imagine you have a some experienced staff,  but FAR too many users raising questions and issues to be able to respond any of them in a reasonably short time*. 

What would be your incisive steps be to resolve the issue?

*As in: less than 30 days

[janndk 527]

20 minutes ago, gazumped said:

So:  imagine you have a some experienced staff,  but FAR too many users raising questions and issues to be able to respond any of them in a reasonably short time*. 

What would be your incisive steps be to resolve the issue?

*As in: less than 30 days

I don't think EN/Spoons have experienced staff (as I understand they fired everybody?), so therefore they should use the resources to get the most basic bugs fixed first.

[PinkElephant 8,181]

From what I see a lot makes sense what’s is done. Many features were requested for a veeeeery long time (jump marks / sections inside of notes, combined with a note TOC: Awesome, even with the deficiencies we still see. Solid importers for major other apps: A necessity, else everybody steals your customers while you can’t attract from others; and so on).

But new releases are pushed off the ramp without even the slightest QA. We had releases that break things. Rapidly fixed, but still I am completely annoyed by this way of running an operation, starting to get „update paranoia“ myself. This is easy to fix: Make it a step in the release cycle, set up a procedure, assign some people, and DO it. You may even find out early who of your devs is more prone to nurture the bug farm than others, BTW.

Example: Just got these days for the 3rd time my iOS offline downloads nuked by an update that toggled the offline switch to OFF. I am traveling a lot, and need access to my content. While I type this, my iPhone is busy downloading my notes again. On the Mac suddenly some offline content was not available any more, with a weird random pattern: 2 notes were created a few minutes apart, similar content, both synced and fine. One fully available offline, the other not.

And now to the support issue: Whenever I asked support anything, what I got was canned stuff as an answer with NO relevance for my problem. 20, 30 or 40 lines of nice sounding and completely worthless answers.I am used to analyze sources professionally: When I strip the niceties away, the legal bywork, the general purpose advise (oh yes, update) and the soothing (oh, it was flagged for the devs, wow), what’s left is the name of the support specialist - probably even that is made up. These answers are worthless, useless, an offense of my ability to read them and understand there is nothing in the package.

This is no way to run any premium service - and I accept no excuses. Either a company lowers their exposure to support queries by improving the product, or it damn needs to hire enough people (and set up the organization to control them) to assure 24hrs 24/7 reaction time. If you can’t for 9 months now, you lost control of your business. It’s like delivering a Ferrari to your customers, pushing the installation of the brakes to a later update. Oooops.

[ferol 471]

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

From what I see a lot makes sense what’s is done. Many features were requested for a veeeeery long time (jump marks / sections inside of notes, combined with a note TOC: Awesome, even with the deficiencies we still see. Solid importers for major other apps: A necessity, else everybody steals your customers while you can’t attract from others; and so on).

But new releases are pushed off the ramp without even the slightest QA. We had releases that break things. Rapidly fixed, but still I am completely annoyed by this way of running an operation, starting to get „update paranoia“ myself. This is easy to fix: Make it a step in the release cycle, set up a procedure, assign some people, and DO it. You may even find out early who of your devs is more prone to nurture the bug farm than others, BTW.

Example: Just got these days for the 3rd time my iOS offline downloads nuked by an update that toggled the offline switch to OFF. I am traveling a lot, and need access to my content. While I type this, my iPhone is busy downloading my notes again. On the Mac suddenly some offline content was not available any more, with a weird random pattern: 2 notes were created a few minutes apart, similar content, both synced and fine. One fully available offline, the other not.

And now to the support issue: Whenever I asked support anything, what I got was canned stuff as an answer with NO relevance for my problem. 20, 30 or 40 lines of nice sounding and completely worthless answers.I am used to analyze sources professionally: When I strip the niceties away, the legal bywork, the general purpose advise (oh yes, update) and the soothing (oh, it was flagged for the devs, wow), what’s left is the name of the support specialist - probably even that is made up. These answers are worthless, useless, an offense of my ability to read them and understand there is nothing in the package.

This is no way to run any premium service - and I accept no excuses. Either a company lowers their exposure to support queries by improving the product, or it damn needs to hire enough people (and set up the organization to control them) to assure 24hrs 24/7 reaction time. If you can’t for 9 months now, you lost control of your business. It’s like delivering a Ferrari to your customers, pushing the installation of the brakes to a later update. Oooops.

This post sounds like you are starting to slowly grow out of this development..

 

[PinkElephant 8,181]

It’s easy to see what’s wrong. It could be fixed. The question is whether this is a factual thing, or a cultural.

Culture eats facts for breakfast, no exceptions.

[Feitz 180]

On 4/27/2024 at 11:03 AM, PinkElephant said:

by an ongoing support downfall that is now going into the 9th consecutive month, when I take August 2023 as a starting point of the support blackout

What would be interesting is what 'real' people complain about, not we here in the forum living in sort of a bubble. If BS are flooded for 3/4 of  year then something probably is very much amiss with their product which results in numerous support tickets being opened.

 

17 hours ago, gazumped said:

Maybe if we could focus on a more welcoming and supportive environment in the Forums with contributors supplying fixes instead of rants and complaints,  we could actually help Support get their act back together again by helping new users and recent adopters work their way around their problems...

I dun't support this.

1. I don't know of a forum that made a long list of bugs, shortcomings and lost features to help program management identify necessary steps

2. I constantly hear that it makes no sense complaining here since BS won't read the comments anyway. So why would it then make a difference what we post here at all?

[Feitz 180]

16 hours ago, gazumped said:

As in: less than 30 days

This support situation is going on for 3/4 of a year and started with BS firing all support staff overseas. Maybe this wasn't the best decision? They could have kept the experienced support team overseas until the product is stable enough to handle the support on their own here in Italy... 

This would have helped with the temporary flooding of support tickets and would have solved the issue of later having too many supporters once the product is out of early beta...

[gazumped 11,706]

27 minutes ago, Feitz said:

They could have kept the experienced support team

Hindsight is a wonderful thing,  but never practical help...

33 minutes ago, Feitz said:

I dun't support this.

I was arguing for less repeated complaining here;  we're users - all I get is bored reading the same comments.  There seems to be a Greek Chorus out there prepared to join in and agree that it's terrible service / shouldn't be allowed / totally wrong,  but a User Forum is meant to help solve problems if it can,  not just agree the situation is hopeless and give up.

Not to mention that with some of the abuse that gets thrown around, new posters are probably wary of saying anything...

42 minutes ago, Feitz said:

1. I don't know of a forum that made a long list of bugs, shortcomings and lost features to help program management identify necessary steps

I don't think that's what the Forum is for either - despite the current lack of apparent service,  my suggestion is to send all that stuff to Support so they can deal with it eventually.  No Support team can operate in a vacuum - unless someone tells them there's a problem with (forinstance) "unnamed attachments",  they're not going to find any issue.  And without access to information about operating systems and versions,  they're not going to be able to work out where and why the code is failing.

[Feitz 180]

21 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Hindsight is a wonderful thing,  but never practical help...

But if you fire a seasoned support team while you're upending the whole product (probably necessarily so) this could have been expected in advance.

A year of overlap wouldn't have ruined them and might have prevented lots of frustrated users.

 

[gazumped 11,706]

As I said somewhere up the page...  "how busy is your support team" is probably not the first question you ask when buying into a new company - and the former staff saying "but you need us" is what you might expect from the departing members...  and his was (I think) the first time the 'Spoons team took over a company with so many active users.  I don't know.  I'm not in any way excusing - the whole process was deeply flawed and the current situation is unacceptable. 

But we are where we are.

...And back to my question:  suppose (for whatever reason) you have FAR too many support requests to deal with in a reasonable time with the staff you now have.  Getting new staff and training them takes weeks or months.  How can you appease your unhappy customers?

I'd suggest one option is that you don't try.  You have everyone available working on support requests and training some new staff,  but there's no magic wand here.  Take on too many people and you can't train them / can't support the future cost.  You rely on the fact that people with issues may leave - users not needing Support will probably not.  Support queries are usually percentage points of user volumes - you do the math.

Support will gradually re-emerge from the smoking ruins of the current situation and be very very good... for a while...  and then we'll have another meltdown.

Been there - have a couple of t-shirts on the subject...

[Feitz 180]

12 minutes ago, gazumped said:

the whole process was deeply flawed and the current situation is unacceptable. 

+1

 

13 minutes ago, gazumped said:

And back to my question:  suppose (for whatever reason) you have FAR too many support requests to deal with in a reasonable time with the staff you now have.  Getting new staff and training them takes weeks or months.  How can you appease your unhappy customers?

Identify most disruptive issues and communicate what you're doing. Just sending canned responses and then not reporting back is the worst route.

Proper communication would give your customers at least a feeling that they are heard and their issues will be resolved later down the road. 

The way it is now (and has been for many months) is that everyone is unnecessarily angry and BS are loosing (I assume) many of their clients and judging from the reviews on other platforms probably have a hard time acquiring new ones.